


Just Tea. Nothing Else.

by Dailenna



Series: No Dream of Her Own [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Ambition, Estrangement, Family, First Meetings, Gen, Grandfather, Pre-Canon, Rumors, Rumours, Training, cadet - Freeform, granddaughter, reputation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dailenna/pseuds/Dailenna
Summary: General Grumman meets his granddaughter for the first time when she is a cadet in his own facility, and is delighted that they have something in common.
Relationships: Grumman & Riza Hawkeye
Series: No Dream of Her Own [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608523
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	Just Tea. Nothing Else.

It was on a rotation away from the rebellion that General Grumman found out his granddaughter had enlisted. This damned rebellion just kept bubbling along – not quite bubbling into a frenzy, but so that they couldn’t be left without a military presence. For eight months he’d been assigned as a commander there, until his time was finally up and a General from Central rotated in with his troops to keep the soldiers fresh.

Grumman took the first week to acclimatise to the base, giving a speech to the resident soldiers on the situation in Ishval, inspecting the teams on base, approving the alchemists’ research, re-evaluating the instructors. Most of it was regular maintenance of a base that had been done in his absence, but that needed a signature – and Grumman was too wary to put a signature to anything he hadn’t checked for himself. Besides, it kept him busy, and if he wasn’t going to have any real power in this country he may as well make his base the best damned base there was.

The second-year class lined up and saluted when he entered, so he supposed he could have noticed her then, but he didn’t, beyond noting her as one of two females in the twenty-man platoon. “Brave girls,” he thought, and moved on. He hadn’t seen a picture of her in years, so how was he supposed to know what she looked like? There were other girls in other platoons, and women ascending through the ranks these days, so one more didn’t stand out.

After Captain Connor had given his regular safety talk, he led Grumman and Major Vought – Grumman’s aide – up a staircase to a sound-proofed booth and let the assistants at the shooting range scurry to be helpful in front of the General.

It was not so cluttered to be considered a storage room, but a handful of chairs were stacked in the back for viewing parties, with a few small tables for tea services. Windows gave a full view of the range before them, and the cadets already at work.

“How are you enjoying being back in East City, General?” the Captain asked, drawing up chairs for them so they could watch the cadets at ease.

“Delighted to slip back into obscurity,” Grumman lied cheerily. “Ishval makes one live through sheer opposition, and Central has far too much politicking for an old man like me. Coming back home to East City, I am quite ready to die.”

The Captain laughed, and Major Vought added, “Not yet, sir. You’ve given yourself to the State, and you’ll die as the State wills.”

“Oh ho ho ho! Well, I’m not dead yet, so we’ll see about that!”

Ruling East City was second place to a man who had once aspired to be Fuhrer. He’d looked pretty good for the job, too, until General Bradley snatched it out of his grasp; the man would have been a fool to have kept Grumman in Central, but the transfer still stung, years on.

He cast an eye over the cadets, taking the clipboard that Vought offered him for any notes. “Second years, yes?” His clipboard would largely remain unused – Vought would write everything down himself. It was always good to have a prop to play with, though.

“That’s right, sir.”

“How are they shaping up?”

“About average, sir. A few who have trouble listening to instructions, but they’re figuring out when it matters,” Connor said, indicating the range. “One of the other second-year platoons has had a few altercations between members, but this one seems fairly stable.”

Grumman’s eyes narrowed. “Altercations?”

“Egos bumping against each other, needing to prove dominance. Childish stuff, sir.”

Grumman grunted and tapped a finger on Vought’s clipboard. “And it’s being seen to?”

Vought made a sound of protest as the tapping interrupted his note-taking, but Grumman saw him start adding a sidenote.

“Yes, sir, as best as we can.”

He gave a brief nod of approval. “Good. It doesn’t come down to race, does it, Captain?”

“No, sir, not as far as I’m aware.”

“When the rebellion settles, we’re still going to have to live with the Ishvallans. Best not let our soldiers start seeing all of them as the enemy.”

Beneath them, cadets retrieved their paper targets. They switched firearms and groups swapped between ranges to test mid-range or long-distance weapons. Grumman eyed a pair of cadets cheering over their scores, but before they could get in anyone’s way an assistant had already arrived to calmly shoo them along.

“Any standouts at the moment?” he asked.

Connor nodded, looking down at the cadets. “Hawkeye. Curtiss and Verville. Martin’s not bad either.”

Grumman pretended that he had been listening to all of those names after the first one stunned him. “Oh, yes? Point them out to me.” It would be the girl. He knew it. Not the redhead – the blonde. He couldn’t quite remember her face from the line-up, but both of her parents were blond.

Curtiss and Verville were the two who had been moved along. Hawkeye was exactly the person he’d thought. He gave Martin a cursory glance, then looked back to Hawkeye. She looked very small and still among the rest of her class. Average height, but quiet and unassuming. A classmate was talking with her, gesturing to Hawkeye’s paper target with wild, happy arms, and Hawkeye responded with a few words and a small smile. Perhaps she was like her father.

For a moment Grumman struggled, wondering whether it could be some other Hawkeye child – a non-relation. He didn’t like to play his cards so openly, but he needed to be sure it was her.

“ _Riza_ Hawkeye, Captain?” he asked, finally.

“Yes, sir,” the Captain responded, curiosity weaving into his words. “Do you know her, sir?”

Vought paused in his scribbling.

Only twenty feet away was a granddaughter he had never met, who he had seen in two pictures before his daughter went from belatedly answering letters to not at all. She had entered his own military base as a cadet and, unless Captain Connor had been kept out of the loop, she hadn’t even used his name to gain favour. Ever the forward-planner of his political intrigues, he had been thrown for a loop by this manoeuvre.

“Not particularly, but the name rings a bell,” he found himself saying. He didn’t want to give her away if she didn’t care for it. “She’s a good shot, then?”

Connor took the abrupt segue in his stride. “Yes, sir! We thought we may have some problems with her at first – she already knew how to shoot when she arrived.” Classic problem: a cadet who thought they knew how to shoot had to unlearn a lot of bad habits before they could learn properly. Knowing how to shoot beforehand wasn’t always an advantage. “But she only took a few weeks to meet standards, and since then she’s been top of the class.”

Top of the class. A part of Grumman wanted to feel proud, but he could take no credit for her talent, not even for helping nurture her into it. He didn’t know the girl at all. “I should meet her,” he said, watching as she passed her pistol over the gun counter and awaited the next firearm.

Captain Connor looked at him. “I could have her come up here, if you wish.”

“No! I wouldn’t interrupt her training,” Grumman laughed. “Make a note, Vought – find a spot in my schedule to have Cadet Hawkeye visit my office for tea.”

“Yes, sir.”

A frown stole over Captain Connor’s face. “Are you certain, sir? It would be much easier to have her come speak with you here.”

“Oh, pish posh. I’ll have a tea break at some point anyway – why not with a pretty face to keep me company?”

Grumman laughed like a vain, entitled old man, and noted Connor’s reticence to let go of his pupil into Grumman’s care. That was a man to watch.

\--

The benefit of rank that Grumman enjoyed the most was the private office that he was allowed to decorate as he willed. He had his desk for working at, of course, tucked away at the back there and surrounded by bookshelves and trinkets he’d picked up over his long career – wall pennants, an animal statue carved out of wood, a generous bottle of whiskey the size of his head. A table with two chairs sat to one side, with his little travel chess set folded up on one side, waiting for contenders to make a challenge.

The antechamber for Grumman’s office was where Vought had set up shop, following Grumman’s lead with a few personal knick-knacks, but ultimately a more spartan place than the office it guarded. It was in this room, as Grumman returned the various instructors’ signed approvals (with small amendments), that he met his granddaughter for the first time.

Grumman had spent the afternoon considering the situation. He found himself wondering what sort a person she would be – she seemed quiet and unassuming by what he had seen. She certainly wasn’t swaggering around, showing her scores, and it didn’t seem that she’d used his name to enter the academy at all. Was it a measure of pride that led her to want to make her own path – or could it be humility, or plain ignorance? It was entirely possible that she did not even know they were related. In her teenage years, Theresa’s dissatisfaction with her father’s military career had grown, and Berthold’s anti-military bent turned it into something more: something big enough that Grumman and his daughter couldn’t talk without fighting about it, and eventually didn’t talk at all. It had been his informants who let him know that she had died a few years after she stopped writing to him. With such headstrong, anti-military parents, Riza may never have heard anything at all about him.

He found himself wanting to test her mettle, caught between wanting to know her and wondering what use she could be to him. Very little right now, but give the child a few years and she might make something of herself. A remnant of familial affection told him he was wrong to think like this, but there was nothing wrong with making use of your resources.

She stopped in the doorway, standing at attention and swinging her arm up into a salute. “General Grumman, sir!” she said.

Very appropriate. Very formal. “Cadet Hawkeye,” he replied, and gave her the required salute in return.

Oh, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Little Riza!” he cried out, approaching her and clapping his hands. “You’ve grown so much! Look – this is the last I saw of you.” He spun and bustled back into his office to retrieve a photo he’d found in a drawer of keepsakes (it may be a work desk, but those drawers had to hold something other than stationery).

Vought reeled back as Grumman returned and foisted the photo in his face. Hawkeye had started to follow him, then had to step aside to avoid being trampled.

“Look at that, Henry – five years old. She’s got my smile, see?”

Vought glanced at the photo, at Grumman’s wrinkled, lop-sided grin, and at Hawkeye’s stunned, unsmiling face. “No, sir, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

Grumman blew a raspberry, and peered at Hawkeye. “You didn’t use my name to enlist, Cadet.”

She schooled her face into something calmer, and said, “It didn’t seem appropriate, sir.”

“To mention your grandfather?” Grumman pouted, enjoying Vought’s sigh of relief and imagined the relief running through his head: not some lovechild from the flirtatious old coot who ran the building after all. He was still a harmless old man, then.

“It … seemed an assumption of a relationship … I’m not here to seek favour, sir.”

There was a determination on her face that he quite liked. She was flustered, but pulled herself together – he enjoyed that she didn’t know what to make of him either. Perhaps, if they had met in a civilian context, she would have been prodding him and testing at him, too, but as it was, this was hardly fair. He was playing with the girl to see who she was, and all she could give back was deference to the structure they were embedded in. He admired that. Was it respect, or was she just playing the game too, with the cards she had been dealt?

He finally relented. “No, very right not to.”

She didn’t respond, and so they observed each other from their distance. He couldn’t decide whether to think of her as a soldier or as a child. She had large, open eyes and round cheeks, but a stance straighter than a post. Most cadets wore the uniform like a fashion accessory or a tool, but, as straight as she stood, she wore it like she was hiding in it.

“Vought, fill my teapot with hot water, would you? And get me some of those caramel biscuits – you know the ones.” He strode into his office, calling back, “Come sit with me, Riza.”

Cadet Hawkeye – Riza – followed him and stood in his office quietly, waiting to be addressed. She was very well trained already. Perhaps if they’d known each other through her childhood she would now be chattering away, calling him Grampa with no regards for the formality of the uniform. If that were the case, she would have needed to be reprimanded and reminded of military protocol. As it was, Grumman wondered if there could ever be that intimacy, although the military was hardly at fault for the weirdness around breaching an estrangement.

“Go on, take a seat,” said Grumman, but it was only after he took one of the seats at the small table that she sat in the other. He repeated her words: “You aren’t here to seek favour.”

“No, sir,” she replied, settling with her hands in her lap.

“What does your father think of you joining the military?”

“He would be ashamed of me, if he had lived to see it, sir.”

He stroked at his moustache thoughtfully. “Ah. So, you joined because you have no-one left?”

A quiet determination rose on her face. Her jaw was set, her back straight. “No, sir, I joined because I want to protect those who need protecting.”

Grumman hummed and eyed her. “Oh, yes?” It was a line he had heard before, but never with such open-endedness. Usually there was a name attached, or a place. As new soldiers spoke about their dreams and their reasons for joining the military, it often came with, “I wanna protect my little brother,” or “my sweetheart,” or “my hometown.”

So he asked: “And who would that be?”, expecting to elicit a name, or some heavy obfuscation of one.

What he didn’t expect was the thoughtful expression. “Whoever … whoever needs it, I suppose,” she said. “The farmers. The traders. The people trying to live peaceful lives. When war rises up, someone must stand between them and the enemy.”

“What an ambition!” Grumman laughed – not a laugh of humour, but of surprise at the breadth of that quiet ambition. “But, my dear, you are just one person – how many people do you think you can protect?”

The thoughtful expression was wiped away, as though his laugh had put up whatever wall of formality had started to come down. “Even one would be enough, sir. I will protect who I can, and if I can save one life, it will be worth it.”

“A good reason to fight,” he said, and the wall softened by a hair.

A knock sounded at the door, and in came Vought with the teapot and two cups on a tray. Grumman fussed as Vought set them down, and shooed Cadet Hawkeye’s hands away from the pot before she could try to pour for the senior officer.

“No, no, you are my guest,” he said. “There is little else I have given you in life – allow me the honour of pouring tea for my granddaughter.”

As he slipped between seriously questioning her, and fussing and laughing, he could see the confusion on her face. Grumman knew he was an unusual person. He kept people off-balance intentionally and it made him hard to predict or easy to dismiss. Somewhere along the way, it had stopped being a tactic and had started just being who he was. He couldn’t help the shift – at some point he had stopped caring what people thought, and when he no longer had to show deference for a higher rank, he no longer had to hide it.

He eyed her over the rim of his cup. “Now, we come at this from unusual circumstances. I don’t think we will ever properly be grandfather and granddaughter, this late in the game – although, as time and duties allow, I would like the indulgence of getting to know you better.”

There was the barest hint of a nod, which he pretended not to notice.

“We both have our own lives, so it needn’t be too intrusive. The odd cup of tea every now and then – perhaps I could mentor you, help you tackle the drudgeries of military life and see how to get ahead?” It had been a while since he’d had a protégé to handle, but he could enjoy this.

She put her cup down. “Thank you, sir, but I’m happy with the teachers I already have. I’m not looking to have any power – only to do my part.” There was a slight pause, and then the delicate admission, “I would like to meet with you again, if I may.”

“Oh ho! Good teachers, are they?” His moustache bristled as he broke into a smile, and he pushed aside the idea of helping his granddaughter to seize power when Bradley was retired, not without some sense of longing.

“Yes, sir. They treat me fairly. They help me improve. Captain Connor even offered to come with me to meet you, if I wanted.” Her eyes flicked up to his with a knowing glance.

“Did he?” Grumman stroked his moustache. “Is he so controlling of his students, now?”

“I would say protective,” she responded, lifting her cup to her mouth. “Surely you must know your own reputation.”

The cutting expression she wore was so like Theresa that he didn’t even pretend to be shocked. It was true, he was well known for flirting with the women around the command centre. Just as a harmless old coot, he thought, nothing dangerous. But he enjoyed breaking the rules so much that he hadn’t even considered how inviting a young cadet alone into his office could look. He couldn’t muster up any energy to care about himself – his aspirations in life had reached this dead-end, and he didn’t have to impress anyone – but he met Riza’s unblinking gaze with equanimity.

“Would you like me to clear up any confusion?” he asked. “I could tell the officers we are related. It will filter down.”

“Sir, I don’t want any favouritism based on your rank. I want to work – and learn – to be the best soldier I can be, without officers trying to please you through me.”

“Even if it means ruining your reputation?”

“My reputation is hardly clean, sir,” she said with a weary look. “From the very first day marks were released, it was torn to pieces.”

His brow furrowed. “Oh?”

An internal struggle passed across her face: a subtle flicker around her eyes and mouth that reflected her difficulty in finding the correct way to speak. “There is a measure of jealousy, perhaps, that has encouraged some to cast suspicion on female cadets who are achieving well.”

Grumman pursed his lips, considering.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “All in all, it is much easier to ignore rumours of my misconduct than solicitations to it.”

His eyebrows jumped up. “So it is!” he exclaimed, wonderingly.

The pride that swelled in his heart was probably somewhat misplaced. The idea that his granddaughter would have to perform favours in order to do well in the military was hardly ideal. Any other grandparent would be trying to figure out how at this stage they could help protect her from unwanted rumours and advances. They’d come down hard on the perpetrators and stamp it all out so that it wouldn’t be a problem for her or for any other women coming through the academy from this point. That might be a thought for later, when he was being sensible about it all.

Instead, he was overcome by laughter. Here was his own flesh and blood at last – and having never met, sharing little in the scope of ambition or personality, she used her reputation to ease her way through the world just as he did, holding up the image people saw of her so behind that image she could do the work she needed to.

Her cheeks went pink as he laughed, whether with embarrassment or her weird, humble sense of pride at her own conniving, he did not know. Grumman wheezed to a stop and wiped tears from his eyes, still smiling.

“Oh, my girl, I like you,” he said, taking up his teacup again.

A small smile played around her mouth. Yes, she was a person of subtlety, and that could be very interesting.

“I would ask one thing,” she finally said.

“Mm?”

“I don’t mind what other cadets say, sir, and the instructors will think what they will – but I would appreciate if you could let Captain Connor know the truth of our relationship. I have done well in his class with my own talents. I wouldn’t want to lose his respect.”

“No, indeed,” Grumman mused. “And you seem to have earned it. I will let him know.”

“Thank you, sir.”

It was the first of what would be many meetings – the initial forming of a relationship that wouldn’t make up for all of the time they’d missed, but that would be theirs. Even if she hadn’t had that little scrap of him in her, that part that was happy to use rumours as a tool, he still would have loved her, he was sure. The simpleness of her ambition was a small bump. If he couldn’t be next for the throne, he would have a hand in forming the next person for it, and he was watching Riza Hawkeye very closely. 


End file.
